A death in the family.

This past Saturday, I lost my bulldog puppy to Hartz. She was only six months old. She was fine the night before, jumping around and licking everyone. The next morning was utter hell for me. I woke up to my mother screaming that there was something wrong with Alice. I immediately ran outside, grabbed the puppy and rushed to the vet. She looked horrible. She was breathing harshly, her mouth was open slightly and she was barking but the barking was muffled. I kept my hand on her chest and any time I moved her, she would cry. Her neck was very, very stiff as well. When we got to the vets, we told him she looked like she had been poisoned. He asked where she could have gotten it from and we said we had absolutely no idea. She was pinned up on our porch and the door leading outside is always locked. When we walked her, she always stayed with us and was on a leash. So, when we saw her and the way she acted, we began to question the things on the porch. My mother and I began looking round and low and behold we found a Hartz Flea and Tick Spray for Cats and Dogs. It turns out, the puppy had chewed on the bottom of the bottle, mind you the bottle was almost twenty years old and almost empty, and had gotten it open and my mother and I guessed the puppy had gotten some of the substance into her system and had swallowed it. When we mentioned this to the vet, he said that it was impossible for a puppy to die from a twenty year old, almost dried out substance at the bottom of a bottle. I disagreed with him completely. I had been on this website about two years ago after I had bought my two dogs the flea drops from Hartz. I freaked out and washed them for almost three hours for fear that they would lose their fur or better yet die from the dosage.

It came back to haunt me in a huge and drastic way. I lost a six month old puppy because she may have licked the inside of a twenty year old bottle. My mom and I looked everywhere and found nothing that would have done her that way. The vet said she was poisoned with a very high dosage. I believe it was the Hartz bottle. That was the only thing it could have been. After reading a lot of the stories on here, I have came to the conclusion that is what killed her. She was a beautiful dog and I miss her very, much. I believe with all of my heart that she was killed by a product that, even after twenty years of being shelved, was still strong enough to paralyze her, place her into shock, and slowly suffocates her to death.

I want to se this banned completely. I want it gone. If a bottle that it well over its shelf life can kill a dog in a matter of hours… there is no telling what this product could do if they amped up the dosage and made it the only thing you could buy off the shelves. I am just utterly speechless by all of this….

4 thoughts on “A death in the family.”

I am so sorry for your loss.. Please see our Facebook page, “Hartz Products Are Killing Our Pets”. We are trying to bring awareness to others about Hartz Products and also offer alternatives to anyone to file a claim against Hartz with the EPA (Governing agency over Hartz) and various other helpful information. Please file a claim against Hartz. It is the only way to get them to pull the product. Again I am sorry for your loss.. I lost my cat to Hartz in August… and am doing anything I can to increase awareness against this terrible company and these awful products.

Thank you. I will contact them. I knew about Hartz a long time ago and never bought it. It was just a fluke that the bottle was out where she could get it… we didn’t even think about it. To think that a twenty year old bottle did what I saw to my dog… this has to be banned.

I am so sorry for your loss. A pet is a very special part of our lives and it hurts terriably when something happenes to them. I put the flea and tick drops on a stray cat that was by my house she had fleas really bad this was on a monday Tuesday night my nabour ran in my house saying there is something wrong with the cat when I ran outside she was on her back going into seasurs i rapped her in a blanket and brought her inside I was panicing and didnt know what was going on so I called my mother she got on the internet and googled the hertz flea and tick drops well I cried and cried because I felt so bad that I put the drops on her. I managed to wash her and get lots of fluids into her I really thought she was going to die and I never seen her for a few days, Then I saw her what a releive but still not the point they should not be aloud to sell this crap. I am very very sorry for you and I feel really bad for you. I am so sorry for your loss and think you should sue them.

I’m sorry for your loss…I’ll give you a 2nd opinion as a veterinarian. I have never liked hartz flea and tick products because 1. they don’t work well and 2. they have a very narrow margin of safety. If the bottle was 20 years old and mostly dried up, that tells me the water evaporated out leaving the concentrated chemicals at the bottom of the bottle (making it even more toxic than if the pup at the same volume of the chemical when it was new). It could have happened with any other chemical, but so many of the other flea and tick products are so safe that the pup could have ingested lots of it without dying, or coming close. Flea and tick products have evolved a lot in the last 20 years…20 years ago we were using powders, dips, shampoos…we didn’t have the nice spot-on treatments we have today. The chemicals were not good for the pets and they were not good for the owner to handle or breathe in, but they were all we had. Now there are so many safer products out there, but not Hartz ones!

Please anyone note that MOST modern flea and tick treatments for dogs are VERY TOXIC to cats. A cat can die if it ingests or absorbs through the skin some k9 Advantix (even though it is a great product for dogs). If you are using it for dogs, but have cats, if your cats interact with the dog much, keep the dog separate from the cat until the product dries. One of the company reps said 24 hours to be safe, I just use frontline , which cannot kill my cats when they licks my dog. When you see the “Do not apply to cats” label, take it VERY seriously